Hyperbots Founders (L-R): Rajeev Pathak, Niyati Chhaya, Ram Jayaraman
THE OPPORTUNITY
Building an AI co-pilot for the CFO’s office
Over the last two decades, automation technologies have transformed most business functions for large enterprises across the globe. However, the CFO’s office has remained highly manual and antiquated when it comes to intelligent automation.
Finance and accounting teams have long struggled with effectively managing and processing large volumes of transactions, including invoices, bills, collection receipts, and expense claims. These cumbersome processes, often handled by numerous accountants working in silos, ultimately result in inaccurate forecasting, planning, and overall financial management.
It is estimated that close to 50% of the 300K+ mid-market enterprises are yet to adopt finance automation and only 8% of these have intelligent automation systems.
The half that implemented automation systems are typically leveraging Robotic Process Automation (RPA) systems for repetitive tasks like data entry or transaction processing. While this has a strong cost-saving proposition, the increased demands of businesses in today’s fast-paced, data driven environment is pushing CFOs to become even more responsive. Their role has shifted from ‘finance managers’ to that of active operators that can help balance strategy and business success.
This has led to an increased demand for tools that go beyond simple mindless automation. CFOs today seek solutions that leverage complex data to:
- Deliver unique, actionable insights
- Seamlessly execute on those insights with minimal manual oversight
With the advent of Gen AI, there is a clear scope for the introduction of next-gen autonomous AI agents that can plan and execute on user-provided objectives using LLMs, while solving for cross-system integration and orchestration.
These agents will combine finance domain knowledge, with specific LLMs and IDPs to create a human-like intelligence that can execute tasks with minimal to no human intervention – which is estimated to be $5 Billion today, expected to double by 2030.
We are excited to announce our investment in Hyperbots, a company that is taking a comprehensive end-to-end approach to simplify complex financial tasks and simplify the life of CFOs around the world.
Hyperbots solutions significantly reduce processing times and costs, enhance data accuracy, and improve overall financial management efficiency. It is currently targeting functions including Accounts Payable (AP), Accounts Receivable (AR), and Expense Processing.
Source: 2020 Gartner Future of Finance Survey; Kalaari Analysis
THE FOUNDING TEAM
Founding team with deep technical expertise and personal resonance with the problem statement at hand
Hyperbots’ founding team includes Rajeev Pathak (Co-founder and CEO), Niyati Chhaya (Co-founder and Vice President, AI) and Ram Jayaraman (Co-founder and Head of Engineering), all of whom bring complimentary skillsets and deep technical expertise.
Rajeev is a seasoned entrepreneur with a proven track record in both sales and operations. He held leadership positions at Wipro, managing a $100M business before co-founding FunToot – a personalized learning platform that was acquired by Reliance Jio Embibe in 2019.
Niyati brings a deep experience of working with NLP and ML technologies from the time she spent at Adobe as a research scientist. She is credited with 40 patents and 50 publications and was leading NLP research team at Adobe.
Ram has 25+ years of experience in architecting and building complex software products. He was the VP of Engineering at Funtoot, and lead architect at Wipro – having closely worked with Rajeev for the last 20 years.
The founders have seen the problem first-hand and have spent significant time with CFOs &design partners in understanding their needs.
THE UNIQUE APPROACH
Hyperbots AI automation Co-pilots are designed by CFOs for CFOs
Hyperbots has taken a comprehensive end-to-end approach to solve this problem and designed their product grounds-up after closely working with prominent CFO’s.
Over the last one year, the team has worked with 25+ design partners in the US, all of whom come from various sectors. This has helped them understand and build a strong MVP.
Their AI Platform has been trained on millions of accounting documents and transactions. Their model at MVP stage has already surpassed human-level accuracy for many tasks. Currently, their MVP features a co-pilot that can automate select few core processes, but their goal is to further evolve into a fully autonomous AI platform with real-time, autonomous accounting and financial intelligence thereby helping organizations optimize their finance processes and make more informed data-driven decisions.
This platform works in tandem with existing accounting, procurement, tax or reporting software systems, learning specific team work-flows; and going a step beyond to augment and fix inefficiencies.
They are currently focused on targeting mid-market, medium enterprise customers in the US, with revenues between US$50 million and US$1 billion – with a clear proposition to reduce human involvement by 80%.
THE WAY AHEAD
Hyperbots aims to revolutionize Accounting and Finance with AI
With the current fundraise, Hyperbots will focus on accelerating their Go-to-market in the US. They also plan to further strengthen their product and engineering team, to further target more use-cases and functions.
Their vision is to build a fully autonomous AI platform with real-time, autonomous accounting and financial intelligence thereby helping enterprises optimize their processes and make more informed data-driven decisions. We, at Kalaari Capital, are thrilled to support Hyperbots in this journey.
Niyati Chhaya, Co-Founder and VP of AI says, “We envision Hyperbots’ transformer-based proprietary models for processing documents like invoices, bills, purchase orders, contracts, and data-driven automated prediction techniques for financial decision making, will help achieve over 80% straight-through-processing of otherwise completely human operated processes. With the support of our partners like Kalaari, Sunicon, and Athera, we are poised to revolutionize the finance operations for US mid-markets”.
Sampath P, Partner, Kalaari Capital says, “Globally, automating functions that pertain to the CFO’s office, remains a challenging and complex endeavor. With proprietary foundational IP and a clear focus on building a vertical finance model, Hyperbots is set to transform the landscape of finance and accounting. We are excited to partner with Rajeev, Niyati, Ram and the entire team, and are looking forward to supporting them on this journey.”
Kalaari Capital is an early-stage, technology-focused venture capital firm based out of Bengaluru, India. Since 2006, Kalaari has empowered visionary entrepreneurs building unique solutions that reshape the way Indians live, work, consume and transact. The firm’s ethos is to partner early with founders and work with them to navigate the inevitable challenges of fostering ideas into successful businesses. At its core, Kalaari believes in building long-term relationships based on trust, transparency, authenticity, and respect.
If you are a founder building an early-stage company, write to us at pitch@kalaari.com